Voice of the people (letter).

Increase In Minimum Wage Is Overdue

February 15, 1995|By Donald Johnson, President, Illinois AFL-CIO.

CHICAGO — The Jan. 10 editorial "Dusting off a harmful wage hike" asserts that "the White House must think Republicans and businesses could live with a mandated wage hike." Someone is looking through the wrong end of the telescope.

The fact is that millions of Americans, most of them adults who are employed full time, cannot live without a mandated wage hike. Millions of those minimum-wage workers are women, including a large percentage of single mothers, while a disproportionate number are minority.

The enactment of the Fair Labor Standards Act more than a half a century ago first established the minimum wage, and in so doing codified an ideal that people who put in a good day's work should receive adequate reward-enough to provide at the very least a decent standard of living for themselves and their families. As wages have risen over the years, Congress has acted eight times to increase the minimum wage, the first six times keeping it near 50 percent of the average hourly earnings of all non-supervisory employees.

The increase to $4.25 signed by President Bush, and which became effective in April 1991, raised the minimum wage to only 41 percent of average hourly earnings. As of September 1994, the minimum wage slipped to only 38 percent of the average U.S. wage of $11.21. Another raise for the working poor is overdue.

Assuming 50 weeks of work a year at 40 hours per week, a worker paid the minimum wage would earn $8,500 a year, $3,309 less than the estimated 1994 poverty line for a family of three. America's economic system should allow something better than poverty in return for hard work. And it should not subsidize with tax dollars, in the form of public assistance payments, what employers should pay in wages.

Every time a minimum-wage increase is proposed, employers trot out the same discredited arguments they have used since 1938-prophesies of high unemployment, inflation and bankruptcy. With the single exception of the 1975 recession, there has been no sharp downturn in employment after a hike in the minimum wage; in most cases, employment has increased.

America's future does not lie in job creation through low wages. And those who argue that a fair minimum wage is the obstacle to higher unemployment have no explanation for the 30 percent jobless rate that existed in the 1930s, prior to its establishment.

Our future lies in opportunity for all, as well as our refusal to tolerate exploitation of the weak. Raising the minimum wage to $5.25 an hour will be more than the affirmation of an ideal; it will be the means by which millions who have been left by the wayside of an affluent society may gain a little more faith in the promise of America.